"Zee, wake up! We've got to get started. You've slept hours."
The real size-change now began. In single file they walked up the black
slope. It shrank beneath them--creeping, crawling, dwindling away under
their feet. The boulders shrank into rocks, into pebbles. In an hour
they were walking upon a smooth surface.
The black void was no longer empty. Mountains showed ahead--and to the
sides. Giant faces of rock, looming into unfathomable distance of the
black sky. The mountains were drawing closer; contracting, rushing down
with a violent movement.
Martt apprehensively glanced behind. A wall of dwindling rock was
coming after them. The drug in these larger doses seemed acting with a
multiplied power. The scene was a dizzy swirl of movement. Mountains
closing in everywhere. To Martt came a flash of terror. They would
be crushed. Their bodies were growing tremendously to fill this
constricted space. . . .
Degg had stopped walking. They were gathered in a group. They were now
in the center of a circular valley, with a ring of mountains closing
in. A ten-mile valley . . . a mile . . . a hundred feet. . . .
But the mountains shrank to hills; to a low cliff-wall--a ridge. . . .
It closed in. . . .
"Now!" shouted Degg. They leaped over the low ledge of encircling rock;
scrambled over it and fell on a level ground above. . . .
Beside them Martt saw a small jagged hole in the ground. . . . The size
of his waist . . . his fist . . . his finger. . . . It dwindled, closed
and was gone; while again, above them and all about, were black, empty
spaces, filled soon with shrinking canyons out of which hastily they
climbed. . . .
A fantasmagoria of climbing, struggling upward to avoid being crushed
by their own growth. . . .
There was a canyon too narrow, with sides too high. . . . They had to
stop their growth, and climb its jagged, precipitous side. The climb
took hours. There was another meal, while Martt slept and Zee remained
on guard.
Then another valley. Broad, with a steeply inclined floor. They grew
out of it; into another; and another. . . .
Martt became conscious of a change in the air. Cooler, with a dankness.
And now at last, overhead the void was no longer black. A suggestion
of purple. And suddenly as they leaped from a chasm which shrank and
closed under them, Martt saw a sky. Somber purple, with stars.
A new conception of it all swept Martt. His Earth--the stars of its
Universe. The Inner Surface of the Atom, Zee's realm--millions of times
larger. And now--compared to Reaf . . . was he now a million times the
size of Reaf? . . . Or a million million? Largeness, unfathomable. A
convex world out here. The surface of a globe, whirling in Space. And
overhead, still other stars, so gigantic--so remote!
V
Martt gazed curiously around. They were at last in Degg's world--the
region of the Arcs. A tumbled land of crags upon which lay a gray-black
snow. Martt's heart sank before its utter desolation--a tumbled waste,
upheaved as though by some cataclysm of nature. Desolation! And as
though to veil it, a fall of blackish snow--a somber, tragic shroud.
It was night. And, Martt surmised, a winter season. Yet the air was not
cold; merely dank. And the snow seemed not cold, congealed perhaps by
the dank, heavy air; but to Martt's touch, not cold, no more than chill.
With her bare limbs and filmy veiling, Zee was shivering. Martt
discarded his jacket, but she did not want it.